What are Slopes?

Slopes refer to natural or artificial inclines in geography and maths. The term can also refer to people of Asian descent.

If you’ve ever walked up a hill, then you have experienced a real-life slope. Geographically, a slope is a ground that forms a natural or even artificial incline. It also means an upward or downward incline or slant. In other words, it is a surface that’s at an angle, such that one end is higher than the other.
One example of a slope is the side of a mountain, hill, or valley. A slope can also be on a street that starts high and gently reclines downwards.

Using the word slope as a verb, we say ‘a bank sloped down to the river.
As you go up the slope, you will feel as if you are spending more energy to move. The steeper that slope is, the more challenging it will be to keep moving. Interestingly, this happens both ways. as you go down a really steep hill, you have to use your physical brakes to stop yourself from rolling down. With that in mind, a slope is the measure of the steepness of a line or a surface.

Slopes in Mathematics

Geography is not the only class that has slopes, though. In mathematics, a slope is the tangent of the angle of inclination of a line. In simpler words, it is how much a line deviates from the horizontal or vertical. As you can see, slope in mathematics means the same thing as it does in geography. They both describe how steep a straight line is.

However, while we see slopes in every direction geographically, slopes only move from left to right in mathematics. This is a critical rule as it determines the type of slope, as we will see below.

Types of Slopes

Mathematics has four types of slopes;
1.    A positive slope. This is when a line goes upwards from left to right.

2.    A negative slope. A line goes downwards from left to right.

3.    Zero slope. A zero slope is where a line goes from left to right but not down or up. In other words, it is a straight line.

4.    An undefined slope. A slope is undefined if a line doesn’t move to the right nor the left. Instead, you have a vertical line that goes up or down.

Here is where it gets tricky. In mathematics, a slope is defined as the change in y over the change in x of a specific line. To accomplish this, you have to take two points on a line. A line that is moving up will have a positive gradient, denoted as m, and the line that moves downwards will have a negative gradient. The higher the number (m), the steeper that slope is.

Slopes in Slang

The word slope wasn’t left out in the making of slang. In fact, the term slope has two meanings in slang;

•    Slope off means leave or come in sneakily, or slip in or out quickly, so no one sees you. In a sentence, ‘Mary sloped off quietly from the party on Saturday’, or ‘they sloped into the hotel at 5 pm.

•    Slope is also a derogatory term for people of Asian or Vietnamese descent because of their slanted eyes. For example, ‘that slope drives as if he’s still in japan’.

There you have it, three different meanings of the words slope. Whichever meaning you choose, be sure to use it in the proper tense.

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